


there were angels dining at the Ritz

by ninemoons42



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels, Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Alternate Universe - Not Human, Bucky may or may not have that Bentley, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Steve's tastes have gotten stuck in the 20th century, and breakfasts at the Ritz, author tries to be funny, but he does have those terrified plants, playing fast and loose with history, the imbibing of far far far too much alcohol, with several jaunts into the present day
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2018-02-19 09:40:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2383616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One's an angel walking the earth, and the other's an angel who sauntered vaguely downwards, and they have something of an Arrangement, and a regular date for breakfast at the Ritz in London.</p><p>Featuring:</p><p>Stephen Ezra-Fell, part-time rare book dealer</p><p>and</p><p>James Crowley, who hisses rather a lot</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I need ALL THE DRINKS (1479)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seratonation](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seratonation/gifts), [sirona](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirona/gifts).



> So this is me attempting _Good Omens_ Steve-and-Bucky style, only I'm not doing the incidents in the proper order, and I'm just whacking around with the Arrangement our two consenting angels have, though I promise the flaming sword and the tire iron and the wings will have to appear at some point. :D
> 
> (No, I could never hope to mimic Gneil and TPratchett - I'm just going to write this my way.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: this is the one with the Spanish Inquisition in.

There was a scream from very violently close by, and the man in the black robes was very grateful for the deep hood that he had pulled down over his face. The hood hid his every flinch and, incidentally, his _unusual_ eyes from public view, and no one he passed remarked on the fact that it was a very hot day, in a very full prison, and he was covered from head to foot.

He had to hide. He hadn’t even had time to do _anything_. All he knew was that this place had suddenly become enemy territory. The worst kind.

Human territory.

Below had sent him a note to go to Spain and it had been interesting going for a while: dishes full of strange mushrooms, for the most part, all of which he had enjoyed immensely (even when some of the mushrooms turned out to be particularly deadly - he’d simply washed the toxins down and left the rest of the diners behind as they choked bits and pieces of the wrong _Amanita_ species down), and he hadn’t even minded when they kept refilling his glass of sherry, because the sherry was growing on him, and that was a nicely unexpected thing to get happily buzzed on. 

But here he was now and the prison seemed to perch over him like a particularly malevolent flock of carrion birds, big ones, hungry and hissing and repeating the cries of the prisoners with malicious relish. 

There was a man in the next cell. He hung from the ceiling by his bound and emaciated wrists, and he looked quite dead, or perhaps he was faking it so well he’d actually gotten _really_ dead, and the man in the black robes said, “You should take him down and put him out of his misery.”

“No, sir,” the cheerful novice next to him said. “We know what we are doing; we know just how much to hurt him. He is alive and will continue to confess to his sins - which we already know, of course, but it is nice to hear those infernal confessions straight from the sinner’s mouth.” And with that the novice wrapped his hands in the burlap sack he’d been carrying. There was a bucket full of coals just outside the cell. The novice picked up a poker from that bucket - its tip was nearly an incandescent red - and he poked the hanging man in the ribs.

Whereupon the poor bastard cried out, tried to jerk away, and began to scream.

“Good work,” the man in the black robes said, faintly, and added, swallowing down the bile and the terrible urge to _wish_ the novice away to someplace prickly and someplace dank and dark and terrible. “I’m pleased. We’re pleased. Off you go to your leaders, tell them what I just said, you’re all doing good work.” 

“Sir,” chirped the novice.

As soon as he was alone, the man in the black robes blessed under his breath and glanced at the rope from which the hanging man was suspended - and obediently, the strands began to unravel, untwisting and fraying, until there was little left to hang from and - SNAP - the man fell, groaning.

James Crowley watched over the man until he died, and then he got out of that prison at most of a run. And then it wasn’t him running, because it was the fine stallion he’d led out of the stables that was doing the running for him, and truth be told he wanted the horse to go faster than its best gallop.

He stopped when he was ten miles away, in the shade of a dust-caked _bodega_ , and he went in and bought several large containers of not-particularly-distinguished red wine. The harsher it was, he figured, the better.

He didn’t wait to start drinking - he _couldn’t_ wait - and he turned the corner and ducked into a conveniently empty awning-hung alley, and then he started drinking, and he simply refilled each container with a wave of his hand as it ran out, and he drank, and drank, and drank some more, and he wanted the alcohol to erase everything he’d just seen, so it did, and the last disjointed thought in his mind before he finally passed out was, “At least Stephen’s not here.”


	2. only one black suit crosses this threshold (almost the present day)

The second cuppa of the day had been made and respectfully contemplated on a scrupulously clean tile-topped counter, and the earthy-sweet steam - dampened with just the right splash of milk - was already starting to fill up the rest of the book shop when there was a lugubrious pounding on the front door.

Stephen ignored the first four knocks, and put his hands in his pockets, and kept waiting for his tea. It had to reach just the right temperature: hot enough to almost scald the tongue, and cool enough to drink in great happy gulps, preferably over an old Bible, old enough for the book to be almost wonderfully crumpling up around the well-thumbed edges - 

More knocking.

He clicked his tongue very softly. It wouldn’t do to get annoyed around the tea.

One more series of knocks.

That was too much, even for him, and he risked a sip of the tea - it was _almost_ right and he would have wanted a few more seconds - but he picked the cup up in one hand anyway, and put his best mild smile on, and went to unlock the front door.

And a mild smile on anyone else would have looked harmless and meek. Stephen Ezra-Fell was not the kind of person who looked harmless and meek.

The broad shoulders might have been a giveaway. The calloused hands, certainly so.

Four men this time, all in identical ill-fitted suit jackets. The details were just as easy to spot as they had been last time: a badly-concealed gun or two (or three); a set of brass knuckles hastily covered up by a stained sleeve; approximately seven knives, including one in a spot that had to have been quite uncomfortable to its wearer.

Stephen noted every single weapon in one quick glance, and said, “Good morning, gentlemen.”

“We’ve come to see if you’ve reconsidered our offer?” said the man in the lead, whose scuffed imitation-leather shoe was edging over the threshold and into the shop itself.

“Last week’s offer, or the one from the week before that?” Stephen asked, blandly.

“All of it,” said the biggest one of the four, who might not have been the brightest of the bunch, all things considered.

“I have. And the answer is still no.”

“We’re prepared to increase - ”

“No.”

“It’ll be worth your while - ”

“No.”

“Mister Azera-fill,” the man in the lead said.

Stephen sighed, and glanced up and down the street, and waved the hand that was not holding the cup full of still steaming tea.

All four men in black looked at each other, looked at their feet, looked at the sky - and broke formation, running, each in a different direction.

Stephen closed the door, and flipped the sign to OPEN, and shook his head. 

He nursed a faint hope that James would come by earlier rather than later.


	3. scourge (winter 1664)

Fearful whispers all around him, and feeble attempts at warding gestures.

The man in the black armor clasped his hands behind his back, and looked up at the sky, and smiled to himself: he thought about blades and about shivering and about gravediggers throwing their picks and shovels away in order to run, run, where the shambling steps of the dead would catch up with them.

He had a few days to do his work without any interference: Stephen had sworn that he would keep his end of the bargain, and Below would not question the sudden influx of numbers, and - he had to hand it to the pained look in Stephen's eyes. It was far, far more effective than several fruitless hours spent over almost-acceptable wine.

He could still remember the worried expression that seemed to have made a permanent home on Stephen's face. 

Not a sight he wanted to see, if he wanted to be honest with himself, and really, his appointed tasks being what they were, honesty seemed to be the strangest way of staying as he currently was.

(He'd rather stay as he currently was because the way up was barred, and going further down was Not An Option. Not if he wanted to live up to the Arrangement.)

So he took his horse by its reins, and snatched an apple or two from a low-hanging bough. Wizened fruit, the more he looked at it; the farms in which he was currently loitering with intent had been reduced to raked-over soil over the past few years, and what could still grow never reached any semblance of looking good or tasting right. He took a bite and spat out the sour pulp, offered his horse the rest - and then watched as the horse shook its head and refused the offering.

He looked around for a ditch and found one - they seemed to be the only things that could multiply these days, if one set the humans to one side of the equation - and when he walked over to the ditch his smile got a little wider. It was perfect. Rats feasting on some kind of dead bird.

He dropped the apple right on top of the rats and they did not scatter at all - merely switched their attentions from the picked-over bones to the juice and to the seeds.

"You multiply, now," he whispered, and his keen strange eyes could pick out the masses of fleas that lived on each rat. 

"Too many people." Stephen's voice, whispering to him, urgent and pained. "They run over the children learning to crawl in the streets. They sell their young men and women at cheaper prices than cattle and - and chickens. I am normally charged with protecting life. But there was a reason I was given a sword - "

"There's a reason," James had said, "for the images of the avenging angel. For the doors marked in blood."

"Yes." And then: "If you do this, it will look like a great victory for - you and yours. But it will also be a cleansing. And there is - there is always the possibility of fire."

"Fire's more your thing than it is mine. And I'll do as you ask, easy." He'd gotten to his feet, then. 

"What, you're not going to talk me out of it?"

"No. Because I see your point."

And he could, as the wind began to pick up, as it began to moan.

The man in the black armor watched as the rats in the ditch finished off the apple, looked around for food and found none - and they scattered. Easy to find each dark little shape as it scampered into the hovels scattered about - and as two, then three, then four started running towards the great house about a mile off down the road. 

He thought of the Four Horsemen and he thought of what would come, and he could actually grin when he considered that what would come was a culling: something that would not discriminate. Something inexorable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did say that this was a different kind of AU, and that Steve and Bucky would fill in the roles of Aziraphale and Crowley, but also be themselves, in a way. 
> 
> Maybe there might be some kind of darkness in Stephen, but it is balanced by the light in James, and so we can see that Stephen had a hand in the Great Plague of London - but it was by James's doing that the plague reached not just the poor who were its readiest victims but also the rich, who in history were better positioned to escape the plague (although not always successfully).


End file.
